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In John Stenbeck’s book “PMI-ACP and Certified Scrum Professional Exam Prep and Desk Reference”, he creates an “agile project management process grid” which describes 87 processes used in agile project management. These processes are divided into five process groups (Initiate, Plan, Iterate, Control, and Close), which are analogous to the five process groups in traditional project management, and seven knowledge areas which can be mapped, more or less, onto the ten knowledge areas in traditional project management.

The previous posts have covered the “Initiate”, “Plan”, “Iterate”, and “Control” process group of an agile project. Tomorrow I start on the “Control” process group, but I first want to define what I mean by that term of “process group”. Why do I use this instead of the word “phase”? Phase implies a sequence that goes more or less from one set of processes to another. In reality, after the initiate and plan process groups, an agile project actually shuttles back and forth between the “iterate” and “control” process groups. However, a project always ends with the “Close” process group.

Today’s post on 4.11 Team Evaluations, which is the third of the 7 processes in the Close process group, and is part of the Team Performance knowledge area.

Although agile terms are self-organizing and self-directing, it is advantageous, according to John Stenbeck, to have effective assessments of team performance. In the spirit of agile, you have the team conduct a self-examination along two dimensions: delivery performance and behavior.

Delivery performance–how efficiently and effectively did the team deliver the features and stories that were defined as the iteration goal? There should be objective external measures such as how many story points were planned versus how many were actually devivered.

Behavior–how well did the team apply best practices from the chosen agile framework . This is a measurement of team cooperation, cohesion, and commitment.

The form used to chart the self-assessment can be as simple as having columns or rows for “above expectations”, “met expectations”, and “below expectations”. This is to be done at the end of each iteration so that trends can be observed, and then finally at the end of the project, when the product is released.